What was New - 1996

A glitch in all the credits pages has been fixed; this should make
the credits look a lot better under Microsoft Internet Explorer.
(For the technically minded, the problem was that the alignment
from the preceding <p> tag was being carried over into a
<pre> block.)

The archive of JMS'
CompuServe
and
Usenet
messages from September through November has been split apart into
smaller files. Apologies to everyone who suffered through the
excruciatingly long download before.

A new introduction to the Background section of the episode guide
for season four is in place. (Select the "Background" link from an
episode's guide page to see a summary of the story up to, but not
including, that episode.)

The
Effects
page has been updated to reflect the fact that Foundation Imaging
no longer does B5's special effects.

Lots of little changes all over the Guide today. I took the day off
work to spend plowing through some of my E-mail backlog. I've
gotten through 220 messages so far; sadly, that's not even half the
backlog, but I'll attempt to catch up before season four begins.
Please bear with me if you notice something is out of date -- it's
almost undoubtedly on my to-do list already, and more mail about it
will only slow me down further!

October 17, 1996

I'll be out of town until October 21, so if you don't see pages
getting updated over the weekend, that's why.

The Poll 5 votetaker is now maintaining Web pages with a
summary
of the results, and an up-to-date version of the results for the
current
episode.

October 8, 1996

Some of you have noted that the Guide isn't using inline JPEGs any
more. They'll be back! The method I was using to choose between
JPEGs and GIFs turned out to be too heavy a load on the server.
Luckily, we'll be installing a faster machine in the next couple
of weeks. And, spare time permitting, I'll shortly be implementing
a more efficient way of doing the picture selection. The JPEGs
will return when the first of those two things happens. Thanks
for your patience.

October 3, 1996

A
transcript
of a recent interview with Bruce Boxleitner, John Copeland, and
Jerry Doyle is available.

Hyperion has moved to a new ISP yet again. If you see that your
browser is listing this server as "http://199.165.129.193/", your
browser is keeping old host addresses around longer than it's
supposed to. You'll want to restart it at some point (though
the old address will continue to be forwarded to the new one for
at least a week.)

The
onscreen credits
for
"Z'ha'dum"
are online. One more round of thanks to George Chauvet for
transcribing them. The
spoiler page
for the episode now contains analysis and other material. Be sure
you really want to see it!

September 22, 1996

The spoiler pages for
"Walkabout"
and
"Grey 17 Is Missing"
have moved to the main part of the Guide. The remaining
season-three episodes' pages are still being maintained separately.

This week's
TV Guide
article on B5 is available online. (That link probably won't work
after July 29.)

July 17, 1996

We have started putting JPEG versions of some of our inline images
in place alongside the GIF versions. Our server should automatically
feed you an image type your browser can handle; if you find you're
getting garbage or a broken-image icon where you used to get a
picture, please let us know. The change will be an ongoing process
over the next several weeks. JPEG provides significant savings in
file size, and thus download time, for some images; it also looks
much better in many cases, especially on 16-million-color displays.

Not all images will be JPEGged, just those that benefit either in
appearance or size. That means most of the navigational icons will
remain GIFs even for people who can handle inline JPEGs.

This feature will probably not be available on mirror sites, which
will continue to serve up GIF images.

By popular demand, new entries in the guide pages will now have
modification dates next to them. Items older than two weeks won't
have dates, so you can scan for the dates to see what's generally
new, then look at the individual dates to see how new each thing is.

This will only affect entries added after this announcement, but
in two weeks nobody will be able to tell the difference anyway.

Since so many people see the episodes on weekends, starting next week
the "This Week's Episode" link will switch on Tuesday morning rather
than Monday morning. That'll give people a chance to check the guide
page for the episode they've just seen without having to hit an extra
page.

Hyperion has switched to a new Internet service provider. You
should notice substantially faster performance, though initial
accesses to the Guide might be slow until our updated nameserver
records have been propogated. (If that's gibberish to you, don't
worry about it!)